As an AdSense publisher, you could create many different ad units to test and try out on your sites. But when you look into your AdSense account, there will be very few active ad units in the My Ads tab, and all other inactive ad units will be hidden. Sometimes you may be looking for an old ad unit to reuse on your site, and in this article, we will discuss the different AdSense ad unit statuses and how you can enable hidden AdSense ad units in your account.
Adsense ad unit statuses
The status of the ad unit is displayed on the “My Ads” tab. An AdSense ad unit has four statuses, although only active ad units are displayed when viewed from your account.
- New is the status of an ad unit created in the last 7 days.
- Active – An ad unit that has been used on your site and received at least an impression within the last 7 days.
- Inactive – An ad unit that was created more than 7 days ago and hasn’t received any impressions.
- Hidden – ad units that have not received impressions and are hidden in the list by default.
Ad unit status is not related to revenue or impression. For example, you can hide an active ad unit if you don’t want it to appear in the list.
Hiding an ad block
Typically, an ad unit’s status changes to “Inactive” after a week and is then removed from the default ad list. But you can also manually hide it at any time from the list.
Hiding an active AdSense ad unit
You can also hide by selecting the ad unit, clicking the Action drop-down menu button, and selecting Hide.
How to activate hidden AdSense ad units?
Ad units with statuses “Hidden” and “Inactive” are hidden in the list of ad units by default. Since Google does not allow you to delete an AdSense block once created, it is recommended that you limit the number of ads in your account for service purposes by reusing these hidden blocks (instead of creating a new block in the same style).
Click on the “Advanced Filters” option in the “My Ads” tab and check the “Inactive” and “Hidden” boxes to view the relevant ad units.
Hidden AdSense ad unit shown
If you want to activate a hidden block, select an ad block and click on the “Show” option to make it visible in the list by default.
For a non-working ad unit, the “Show” option will not work. You need to get an advertising code and place it on your website. As soon as there are impressions in the ad unit, the status will be automatically changed to “Active” and the unit will be moved to the default list.